Todd Solondz's Happiness 'sequel' features Pee-Wee Herman

Watching a Todd Solondz film is a bit like driving past a crash scene. If you turn your head towards it, you know there may well be horrors inside, but it's almost impossible not to look. Solondz's is a curiously edge-of-the-seat form of humour, like the sharp intake of breath just after someone makes a particularly suspect joke.

Variety reports this morning that the film-maker's latest feature has finally secured the finance to move into production. As yet untitled, it will centre, according to the film industry bible, on "a group of struggling individuals struggling to find a place for themselves in an unpredictable and volatile world". Sound familiar? Variety also says that the new film will represent a companion piece, a "quasi-sequel" as it were, to Happiness, Solondz's jarring 1998 comedy about sexual desire, unrequited love and ... well, abject misery in middle class New Jersey.

The new film will reportedly be told through a series of intersecting love stories in which the past haunts the present and imperils the future: "ghosts circle and loom, trouble and console", says Variety. The cast includes Demi Moore, Emma Thompson and Paul Reubens.

Yes, you read it right: the same Paul Reubens whose alter ego Pee-Wee Herman was one of the US's biggest stars until he got himself arrested in Sarasota, Florida in 1991 for masturbating publicly in an adult theatre during a screening of Nurse Nancy. It looks like Solondz isn't planning to make it any easier on us this time around.